Enterprise open source Toolkit

Debian 'Lenny' released

Tom Espiner ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 16 Feb 2009 12:45 GMT

Debian 5.0, code-named 'Lenny', has been officially released.

Scheduled for a Saturday 'Valentine's Day' release, the distro was made available on Sunday, Steve McIntyre, head of the Debian project, wrote in a blog post.

Debian 5.0 features hardened security. Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is now a priority standard, which means it will be installed by default during new installations. However, it will not be enabled by default, according to the Debian 5.0 release notes.SELinux enables policy-driven security configuration, and was initially developed by the American National Security Agency (NSA).

On the server side, features include support for IPv6, Network File System (NFS) 4, PostgreSQL 8.3.5, MySQL 5.1.30 and 5.0.51a, Samba 3.2.5, PHP 5.2.6, Asterisk 1.4.21.2, Nagios 3.06 and Xen Hypervisor 3.2.1.

Explicit support for netbooks such as the Asus Eee PC has also been introduced.

Open-source product and service provider Sirius Corporation welcomed the release, claiming that the Debian distro offers value-for-money for enterprises.

"Over the past 10 years we've proved Debian has the lowest total cost of ownership of all major Linux distributions," Mark Taylor, chief executive of Sirius Corporation, said in a statement. "With Debian there are no strings. There are no 'subscriptions' to pay if you want updates, no commercial tie-ins with middleware stacks. The Debian guys take software freedom very seriously and just happen to produce the most scalable Linux distribution available."

Taylor said that the 'Lenny' release saw the inclusion of functionality designed specifically to encourage enterprise adoption, including options for open-source middleware such as JBoss, Glassfish or Spring; infrastructure services such as OpenLDAP, Samba or Exim; and enterprise-grade databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.